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Just confirming that the account hasn't been deleted, but it has disappeared.

I've dug around into the possible causes and have ruled all out but the database messing up. The webhost will run a db repair to see if we can dig something up, hopefully the account will pop back into existence.

Very concerning as we don't have an easy explanation for it, but we do know it wasn't intentionally or accidentally deleted. All Admin actions are logged in the system and there's no action taken to delete the account. We also know the Admin CP hasn't been breached, so it's not a hacker.

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I've investigated all options and a database restore looks like our only solution. We don't know why or how it's happened, but suspect a database corruption. That could be from a server reboot, HDD failure, read/write error...anything hardware related. Whatever the case, it's the server not the software.

I need to find out as near as possible when this issue first occurred. Diana emailed me about lunchtime yesterday. Any chance we can find out from photorob when he first noticed this problem?

If we do go with a restore, we're going to lose new threads, posts and members since that database image was taken. We have backups from the 15th (possibly after the issue), 14th (possibly before or after the issue), the 12th (likely before the issue) and 6 other backups dating back to Feb 5.

I suspect that at the least we'll lose a day or two of posts and at the most three days if we want to restore those members, but it depends heavily on when this problem started. New members aren't a big problem, I have an email list for them.

Any help we can get with the timeline would be greatly appreciated as it will minimise data loss, should we opt for a restore.

We'd have to restore the entire site. That's a difficult thing to do on a 17000 member forum.

That seems a bit heavy handed. That kind of restore will wipe out a lot of content and newly created accounts. Is there any benefit to restoring the site into a VM and then being able to migrate data from the VM into production?

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That seems a bit heavy handed. That kind of restore will wipe out a lot of content and newly created accounts. Is there any benefit to restoring the site into a VM and then being able to migrate data from the VM into production?

Can't do it, the site's too big and it'd take way too long to nut it out.

Our options are a full restore or try to figure out how to avoid a repeat episode while trying to help those affected by this issue (we can buff the post count and join date for re-registrations and the content still exists albeit with the "Guest" prefix).

The forum's been running for at least 15 years now and this was a first for us. We'd expect a database crash to affect everyone rather than a small segment.

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Can't do it, the site's too big and it'd take way too long to nut it out.

Our options are a full restore or try to figure out how to avoid a repeat episode while trying to help those affected by this issue (we can buff the post count and join date for re-registrations and the content still exists albeit with the "Guest" prefix).

The forum's been running for at least 15 years now and this was a first for us. We'd expect a database crash to affect everyone rather than a small segment.

That's too bad. I think it'd be better to forgo the restore and fix the affected users manually. Since you found the content was not deleted, that's a good foundation to build on.

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Yes. Please recommend they he uses the same username. We can't link the old posts back up (they're still on the forums with a "Guest" prefix) but we can adjust the post count and join date, if that bothers anyone.

What's concerning is all affected users are "Robs", which concerns me that this was a targeted attack against the Pres. But to do that, they'd need to access the db and run an SQL query for "Rob". I seriously doubt that's happened , it's just a very odd coincidence that the wiped records all seem to start with the first name Rob, even though their display names are quite different.

Also, if an affected member has a Cigar Locker, please contact FOH staff and we'll get the accounts linked back up.

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Boys if you have anyone who is effected and they have a locker can you get them to email me on lisa.goreta@clubczar.com so we can link their new account with their OLH account. Their stock is still showing on the OLH site but just not linked